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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
National
Alahna Kindred

WhatsApp's major new update will change how you communicate with friends

A new WhatsApp feature is set to be unveiled and will change how you communicate with friends.

The feature is called Communities and will help users place several groupchats together under one topic to share updates more effectively.

The Meta-owned messaging app will be slowly rolled out as a test at first, company boss Mark Zuckerberg said.

He add that the change was an "important evolution" for WhatsApp.

Users will be able to organise different group chats together under a single main topic such as their children's school or the street they live on.

Community admins will also be able to share messages with everyone and have control over which groups can be included.

Good move by WhatsApp? Have your say in the comment section

The feature is called Communities and will help users place several groupchats together under one topic (NurPhoto/PA Images)

Mr Zuckerberg said: "We built WhatsApp Communities to make it much easier to organise all your group chats and find information.

"You'll be able to bring different groups together into one community - for example, in addition to individual groups for different classes, you might have one overall community for parents at a school with a central place for announcements and tools for admins.

"We're going to start rolling this out slowly, but I expect this to be an important evolution for WhatsApp and online communication overall.

"In the same way that social feeds took the basic technology behind the internet and made it so anyone could find people and content online, I think community messaging will take the basic protocols behind one-to-one messaging and extend them so you can communicate more easily with groups of people to get things done together."

A similar Community feature will also be introduced on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram in the future (Getty Images)

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A similar Community feature will also be introduced on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram in the future, he added.

Alongside the Communities feature, WhatsApp has announced several other updates coming to group chats, including the ability to use emoji reactions in response to specific messages, an increase in file sharing to now support up to 2GB of material and voice calls that can now support up to 32 people.

Last month, we reported on how deleted messages can be recovered by using a little-known trick involving the app's notification history.

The Daily Star reports tech guru ' Ta Tech Tips ' shared a video explaining exactly how you can view deleted messages on your Android device, and it's dangerously easy.

He explains that if you're on an Android device, it's as simple as opening the Settings app on your phone. Then, search for 'notification history' and turn it on.

A new WhatsApp feature is set to be unveiled (Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock)

This means that when you get a message that is deleted, later on, you'll still be able to view it through your notification history.

You can do this by opening the settings app again, heading to notifications history and tapping 'recently dismissed' any time you want to see what has vanished.

Sadly, the trick doesn't work on iPhone as it doesn't have a notification log feature, but this might change in future.

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